Buffer Pools Aren't Enough: The Case for Contracted Durability - with Luke Pritchard

In this episode, Eve Tamme digs into contracted durability with Luke Pritchard, Director at Beyond Alliance, a coalition of major carbon dioxide removal buyers.

Last month, Beyond Alliance published a white paper with RMI and the American Forest Foundation, developed with input from both engineered and nature based CDR developers, setting out what contracted durability could look like and how it fits into the wider policy landscape.

The conversation opens on why durability has stayed unresolved for so long. Luke explains that setting the threshold too low leaves open questions about who holds liability after the monitoring period ends, while setting it too high, without a mechanism like a permanence trust or horizontal stacking, locks nature based solutions out of the market entirely. Buffer pools and insurance, he argues, were never built to guarantee the long duration outcomes that durability requires on their own.

Eve and Luke get into what a permanence trust would actually cost, with Luke citing anecdotal buyer estimates of around 15 percent on top of the credit price, and the tension this creates: cheaper nature based credits paired with contracted durability could pull demand away from engineered removals unless separate price support policy exists. They also map contracted durability against the live policy moments where it could land next, from the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism and California's SB 905 process to the EU, SBTi's Net Zero Standard, and ICVCM's continuous improvement work.

The episode closes with a premortem: Luke's biggest worry is undercapitalization, a permanence trust that takes in too little up front, misjudges reversal risk, and runs out of money when it is needed most.

Links

• Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
• Luke Pritchard: LinkedIn
• Contracted Durability: A Framework for Performance Based Carbon Removal by Beyond Alliance, RMI, and American Forest Foundation.

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